Lord Leicester's System.. 19 



ajl weeds, but not so grass seeds. The cost of cleaning after a 

 com crop, when the land is foul, is very considerable, and nearly 

 the value of the crop is consumed .in the process; besides, I 

 believe that the constant cultivation that would be necessary 

 would utterly pulverise and destroy the flag* that had been 

 ploughed in, thus reducing the land to its former unfertile state, 

 and precluding tte possibility of its producing, without the aid 

 of manure, three more profitable crops. It is a fact well known 

 that very poor soils f are injured by constant cultivation and 

 exposure to the sun, though such a procedure is necessary when 

 the land is foul. If a root crop is first taken, the pasture should 

 be ploughed in the winter, and cross ploughed in the spring. I 

 have never known a summer when, betwefcn March and July 

 — tin which latter month rape or turnips should not be sown — it 

 has not been easy, at a trifling expense, to destroy any vitality 

 that may exist in the . flag. The flag should be ploughed in just 

 previous to the sowing of a crop of rape or roots, pressed with a 

 drill-roller, and, should/there be any life left in thistles or couch, 

 the extraordinary luxuriance of the rape or turujps would entirely 

 destroy all life ; during the time the land was under cultivation 

 not a weed of any kind, except the annuals, the seed of which 

 is in the soil, would appear. 



" I think that it is evident that xmder this system the 

 acc\miulated fertility of the pasture is not exhausted by the 

 four: crops, as I have this year had nearly six quarters of barley 

 per acre, the fom-th crop on a forty-acre field, and a considerably 

 better yield than I have obtained on the good land farmed 

 under the four-course system ; these poor lands after pasture 

 usually produce better crops than the better lands. The root 

 crop would in the first year disintegrate the flag, and prepare 



every joint. Other species of grasses, such as smooth-stalked meadow 

 grass and bent grass, are also known as couch grass, and both these 

 species produce abundance of seeds, which may be either in the land sown 

 down or in the purchased grass seeds. The seeds of all agricultural 

 grasses in ordinary use can be obtained absolutely free from the seeds of 

 couch grass, and all kinds of grass seeds may now be obtained of as high 

 a degree of purity as that of clovers. 



* Mag is equivalent to turf. 



t T'Hde "Decomposition of Vegetable Ifatter on Warm Slopes." 

 Appendix III. 



O 2 



